It had never occurred to me that simply being with a fellow prisoner would make me feel like I was still in prison.

Media was a battle ground. So was the internet. People began walking openly with their weapons, whether it was a gun or a camera. Drones were always skimming overhead, filming the violence of the second civil war of the United States.

Colorful characters are the odd shaped pieces that fill the holes in life's puzzle.

In the nineteenth century, The Romantics viewed Nature as benign, a glowing reflection of God's grace. Now we know better. Nature is brutal and, if it is feminine, she's not the kind of woman you can trust. Human beings may be her finest achievement yet, but when you get right down to brass tacks, we're meat. AIDS and organisms like streptococcus don't give a crap that we subdued the earth or produced a Shakespeare...

I have before suggested that a genuine blackguard is never without a pocket-handkerchief.

With riddles as black as coals, and answers as invisible as our past, I can only depend upon the crest of the rolling wave I now traversed; a romance worshiped only by the dreamer in us all, a psithurism of trust making its way through the years of our ascension to one day climb above the kaleidoscopic canopy of this mortal coil.